Perdue on Ag Communications Pt 1

Perdue on Ag Communications Pt 1

Bob Larson
Bob Larson
I'm Bob Larson. Job one in agriculture today is telling the stories of the all the great things being done by American farmers and ranchers. That was the message from Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue last week when he stopped off in the Tri Cities to talk with Washington farmers.

Perdue says he recently found the battle boiled down simply ...

PERDUE ... "This was on a T-shirt I found the other day in Colorado. It's the definition of farming, which is a noun: it says 'the art of losing money, while working 400 hours a month, to feed people who think we're trying to kill them. So, that's the communications challenge we have out here."

Perdue says it's everyone's responsibility to spread the word, and he encourages all the young people in farming to hone their communications skills ...

PERDUE ... "When you get up and you hear agriculture being bashed as trying to kill us or all this stuff about the GMOs and that. We've got to speak up! We've got much less part of our disposable income to feed our families than any other nation in the world. We ought to be proud of that. We ought to be celebrating agriculture and being two or three or four generations away from farming, we are complacent about that and we've allowed the world and our neighbors to become complacent about that. So, we're looking for good Ag Communicators."

Perdue spoke at a gathering sponsored by the Washington State Farm Bureau at Tagaris Winery in Richland and was joined by Representative Dan Newhouse.

Listen tomorrow for more on this communications crisis.

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